


Perfectly Ordinary

by Firecracker (Firecracker907)



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Ginny Weasley is a Good Parent, Harry Potter is a Good Parent, Muggle Life, Muggle suburbs, Multi Chapter, Sharon and the book club, The Potters are a very strange family indeed, clueless Muggles
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-05-07
Updated: 2020-05-07
Packaged: 2021-03-03 00:00:57
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,145
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24055585
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Firecracker907/pseuds/Firecracker
Summary: Beech Street was inhabited by perfectly normal, well-put together families, thank you very much. They had an image to maintain of the perfect neighborhood, and no one was going to ruin that. Until the Potters moved in.
Relationships: Harry Potter/Ginny Weasley
Kudos: 38





	Perfectly Ordinary

If one were to ask the inhabitants of Beech Street about their neighbors, the answer would generally be that it was a very normal neighborhood, with normal people living with their normal families. Everyone parked their car in a sizeable garage, drove their average number of children to school and went to neighborhood barbecues and bake sales. Scandals rarely happened on Beech street, as its population consisted of suburban nuclear families who sent out annual Christmas cards showcasing their happy marriages and rosy-cheeked children. Everyone wanted to keep up an image, and no one wanted to be anything but perfectly ordinary. That is, until the Potters moved in.

When the Potters first moved in, they seemed like just another young family settling down to raise their children in the peaceful suburbs. As far as the other neighbors could tell, they were a young working couple with three children, two young toddlers and a baby. They drove a small family car in a mid-range price point with a baby on board sticker and they set up a children’s play set out in the front yard. The husband seemed to work at an office, judging from his semi-formal tie and shirt ensemble, and the wife was some kind of professional sports player, judging from the athletic attire and large duffel bag she carried out to the car each morning. During the day the children seemed to be gone too, off at a relative’s or day care, the neighbors assumed. They had been friendly and accepting of a barbecue invite when the neighborhood’s matriarch, Sharon Collins, dropped by to say hello. She reported her findings to the neighborhood women at their book club the next day, sating some of their curiosity about the new inhabitants of 23 Beech Street. The husband was called Harry, Sharon explained, and the wife Ginny. Their children were James, Lily, and Albus. Fairly normal names, for the most part. Yes, all right, Albus was a bit strange, but perhaps it was a family name? There was always one slightly odd family name that got passed down among the generations, the book club decided. Jane Wright’s son, Abernathy, was a good example. Sharon reported that their house had looked relatively tidy, although they hadn’t finished unpacking, and the children apparently were looked after by Ginny’s parents during the day. They seemed like a perfectly normal, happy young family. 

Slowly, the neighbors began noticing odd things about the Potters, things that didn’t fit into the Beech Street status quo. For one thing, they seemed completely unbothered about the state of their front lawn. After about a month of their moving in, they had yet to mow the lawn once, and Sharon questioned if they even owned a lawnmower. Certainly they seemed surprised at the idea of cutting it every week, as if the grass looked better long and scraggly with twigs and leaves lying about. Apart from not mowing their lawn habitually, the Potters painted their house an absurd shade of bright red, which clashed horrendously with the surrounding houses of understated brown or beige. They also let their children finger paint on the side of the house, so that one wall was covered in neon yellow handprints and doodles. Sharon nearly had a stroke when she saw it, and rushed off to call an emergency meeting of the book club to bemoan the eyesore the Potters had created. As the weeks and months passed, the book club got more material for their weekly complaints about the neighborhood’s new pariahs. They didn’t wash their car often enough, their children wore their shirts inside out and backwards more often than not, and their mailbox was severely dented from the time Harry Potter had driven backwards into the mailbox when backing out of the driveway. This last incident had been the subject of much neighborhood gossip, and the book club especially liked to recount how Harry had shouted strange words at the mailbox repeatedly before simply hitting it with an odd-looking cricket bat in order to try and restore it to its previous shape. This attempt had been only half successful, so that now the mailbox leaned dangerously close to the road. The Potter’s mailbox was the subject of much scrutiny for several weeks, until suddenly it seemed to have been repaired overnight, and it stood proudly on the curb, not a dent in sight. When Sharon questioned Ginny about the repaired mailbox at the next neighborhood playdate, she simply laughed and said something about her sister-in-law owing them a favor. “She’s always been good at that sort of thing, you know.” Ginny had said, as if this was a skill one’s sister-in-law might easily have. Sharon would have attempted to gain more information on the subject, but Ginny was then distracted by her sons, who were scaling Abby Miller’s fridge in search of the cookie cupboard. Little hooligans, Sharon thought as she watched Ginny pry James loose from the fridge with some difficulty. No regard for their own safety. This opinion of the Potter boys was soon shared by many of the neighborhood mothers, who felt that Ginny and Harry seemed to let their children run completely wild. Once, about a month after the Potters moved into 23 Beech Street, their oldest son, three-year-old James, jumped off of the roof and into a pile of leaves. He was completely unharmed and his parents seemed to think that this was a regular occurrence. The younger boy, two-year-old Albus, seemed to be taking after his brother. He had once got ahold of the scissors and cut all his hair off, most of which seemed to have grown back by the next week. Ginny simply explained to a flabbergasted Sharon that hair grew quickly in their family. Even the baby, Lily, seemed odd. One morning on her way out of the house, Sharon spotted Ginny settling a green-haired baby in the car seat between the boys. Later that afternoon, Lily no longer had green hair, and neither Ginny nor Harry ever offered any explanation for this peculiar incident. All of these incidents combined led to the commonly-held opinion among the neighbors of Beech Street that the Potters were a rather strange family.

Two years after the Potters moved in, they were still a common subject of gossip. Their strangeness had become part of the book club’s weekly discussions, and there was nothing Sharon liked more than to complain about the Potters’ neon yellow fence or the unexplained sound of explosions coming from inside the house. But this week, Sharon had new material for her weekly rant, which was the event that she and the others had been dreading since the day she witnessed the Potter boys running down Beech Street in black capes, shouting gibberish at the other children and scaling the neighbor’s homes. James Potter was starting kindergarten.


End file.
